3-D Viewing without Goofy Glasses

3-D Viewing without Goofy Glasses

Small-screen 3-D: This is an artistic rendering of WOWvx 3-D screens, which are coated with lenses that project slightly differing images, allowing viewers to perceive depth without wearing 3-D glasses.

With the release of a new set of 3-D video screens next week,
Philips
Electronics is bringing a sci-fi cinema standby a little closer to everyday
use. Philips’ WOWvx displays–which allow
viewers to perceive high-quality 3-D images without the need for special
glasses–are now beginning to appear in shopping malls, movie-theater lobbies,
and theme parks worldwide.

The technology
uses image-processing software, plus display hardware that includes sheets of
tiny lenses atop LCD screens. The lenses project slightly different images to
viewers’ left and right eyes, which the brain translates into a perception of depth.
For now, the screens are expensive and not yet marketed for home use. But
Philips, which first released the technology in 2006, is working on technical
improvements that will make the screens better suited for the home.

“We think this is a huge leap,” says Wolf-Nils
Malchow, production manager for the Munich-based Kuk Filmprodukion, an early producer of
content for the displays and of promotional films for clients such as Deutsche
Telekom. “It is a bit like a few years ago, when [high-definition video] kicked
in. Everyone is excited about it.”

A planned deployment of about 50 screens in U.S. theater lobbies has begun at the Bridge
Theater in Los Angeles.
South African shopping malls have ordered about 350 of the screens. Other
rollouts include malls and coffee shops in Russia, European casinos, and theme
parks, the company says. And at next week’s Infocomm
trade fair in Las Vegas,
new 52-inch and 22-inch options will be added to the existing 42-inch model.

This isn’t the first time that 3-D has made a splash. The early
1950s and early 1980s each saw their own fads. The 3D movies from the 1950s were
filmed with two cameras, with the separate images then projected simultaneously.
The familiar red-and-blue-lensed glasses were used to trick the eyes into
interpreting color differences as distance. Modern 3-D movies employ more-sophisticated
approaches, such as projecting the separate images in polarized light and using
glasses with polarized lenses that filter out one image on each side.

But a combination of advances in computer image processing
and industrial optics has allowed companies like Philips to develop their glasses-free
technique.

As with earlier techniques, the illusion requires specially-created
content to start with. In this case, a digital movie file effectively has two
frames for each ordinary movie frame. The first is an ordinary color image,
identical to what would be seen on a two-dimensional screen. A second frame,
rather than showing a second offset view, encodes information about how viewers
should perceive depth in the first frame. It appears as a grayscale version of
the first, with white indicating foreground objects, black denoting deep
background, and shades of gray indicating points in between.